


Swallowed Up by the Sun

by Inkyrius



Category: We Know the Devil (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Multi, Pining, Post-Canon, Texting, Yellow Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 18:28:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16247336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkyrius/pseuds/Inkyrius
Summary: The morning star shines brightest before the dawn, but then the sun rises, and everything goes back to how it was.





	Swallowed Up by the Sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [daekie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/daekie/gifts).



The last days of camp drag on forever, and then suddenly it’s over. Venus lugs her stuff out of the cabin in silence. It’s the way she’s done pretty much everything since the devil.

Summer is almost over, but it’s still way too hot for long sleeves. Not that that stops her. She’d only packed one sweater, but she’s been wearing it religiously, tugging the sleeves down as far as they will go. Anything to hide the marks on her arms that are no longer quite eyelids.

She can feel Jupiter’s eyes on her, the unsubtle way Neptune looks up from her phone every few seconds, but it doesn’t matter. She’s finally getting out of this place.

She doesn’t know why she waited for them to be ready before walking to the pickup point. Or rather, she does know, which means that she knows how pointless it was. She knows that they’re just being nice to her. They have each other, so why would they care about her? They’re never going to see her again. Trying to savor these last few minutes with them is utterly pointless.

She opens her mouth anyway, trying to articulate something about how much it meant that they were there to see her, see how horrible and beautiful she could be. They already know the worst parts of her, and they can’t judge her for much longer anyway. They deserve to know the rest of the truth.

Only she’s waited too long, because they’re at the pickup area, and her father is already waiting for her. Does he know what she’d done? She’d tried to ask what happened after you were the devil, way back at the beginning of camp, but the bonfire captain had just laughed and told her that she didn’t have to worry about that. Then he’d looked meaningfully at Neptune. She was too busy looking at her phone to notice, which was a shame. Watching her tell him off would probably have made it easier for Venus not to laugh in his face.

But that’s a distant memory, back when Venus could still pretend to be good. Now she’s standing between the only two people on the planet who know the real her and the family that’s never even tried, knowing what she has to do but wishing everything were different. As if wishing has ever helped her before.

She takes a step forward, raises a hand vaguely in Neptune and Jupiter’s direction. “So, um. I guess this is goodbye.” She’s surprised by how clear her voice comes out. She’d half expected it to dissolve with her wings.

“I guess so,” Jupiter says. She reaches out to Venus, uncertain, only to turn the gesture into an awkward wave instead. She snaps her hair tie against her wrist. “I just wish…”

Venus shakes her head. “It’s fine.” This is how it was always going to be. It was stupid of her to think otherwise. Anyone could see that Jupiter and Neptune were made for each other. Anyone could see that Venus was never going to be good.

“No, it’s not,” Neptune says. “It’s the Summer Scouts. Everything here is as far from fine as it is possible to be.” She starts to scoff, but the sound transforms into a cough halfway through. “Ugh. Whatever, it’s over, we all survived and now we can finally leave.” She gives Venus that mocking smile. “I’ll never forgive you for getting out of here even half a second before I can.”

Venus catches herself smiling back, though she knows she shouldn’t. She turns and walks away before anyone can make a bigger deal of this. Once she’s in the car, though, she can’t keep herself from looking back. Jupiter is waving wildly. Neptune’s back on her phone, but she looks up long enough to blow a kiss.

And then they’re gone, and it’s just Venus and her father. She waits for him to say something, to yell at her or insult her or plead with her. It’s the least she deserves. It will be refreshing, after a week of everyone tiptoeing around her.

But instead he says nothing. Venus used up all her words that night a week ago, or else spent them on conversations she knew better than to actually have, and now she has nothing left. The drive home is silent.

When they arrive, her father offers to carry her stuff in, but Venus is already picking it up and rushing to her room. She wants the security of the familiar, of things that can’t know what she’s done.

Instead, she finds herself someplace alien, strewn with artifacts of a former life. She can’t have changed that much, can she? There has to be some way to take it all back. She doesn’t want to, but she has to. She has to readjust to this too small room and this too fragile body and the subtle wrongness of it all.

Maybe she can never be good, but she’s so tired of being bad.

 She collapses onto the bed, face down and shoved into a pillow, and tries not to think about it. She must succeed, because the next thing she knows, she’s being roused by a soft buzzing noise. She groans and pushes herself up onto her forearms.

Her phone is on the bedside table where she’d left it, its screen lighting up with incoming notifications. She squints at it. Just as she begins to decipher the text, it goes dark again. She rolls her eyes and reaches over to unlock it properly.

She’s expecting some kind of alert, maybe. A reminder of yet another expectation she’s failing to live up to. Or maybe there’s some registry for people who were the devil, and she needs to add herself to it.

Instead, what she sees is a picture of Neptune. She’s in the passenger seat of a car, and in the background Venus can see someone who has to be Neptune’s mom. They look remarkably similar. The biggest difference is the look of amused disdain on Neptune’s face, so unlike her mother’s tight frown.

Under the picture, she’s written, “It was pretty obvious that you were going to keep moping, so I stole your phone while you were asleep so and added you to my contacts. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

The phone vibrates in Venus’ hands. “I gave Jupiter your number too, so if she hasn’t texted you yet, she will. If she doesn’t, let me know so I can yell at her.”

Looking at it makes emotion well up in Venus’ chest, too big and complex to put a name to. She wouldn’t let herself name it anyway. She wants to laugh, she wants to cry, she wants to block Neptune and spare her the trouble. Neptune may not think she’s good, but she’s so much better than Venus, and Venus refuses to let her corrupt herself over her.

She’s torn from her thoughts by yet another text coming through. “Also do you really not have Snapchat or anything? Why do I have to text you. The only person I actually text is my grandmother on Christmas, and that’s because she bought her phone in 1996. That’s before you were born, you have no excuse”

Venus chokes on a laugh that might actually be a sob. Then she turns off her phone and goes back to trying to sleep. She really can’t handle Neptune’s cruel kindnesses right now.

When she wakes up again, the sun has set, and the house is quiet. She risks venturing to the kitchen long enough to grab a bag of chips. She doesn’t encounter anyone on the way; the door to her parents’ room is closed, with no light streaming out from beneath. She doesn’t know how long she can get away with avoiding them. She kind of wants to find out. She shouldn’t, of course, should take the opportunity for redemption that she’s so generously been handed. It would be rude to waste it.

She still tiptoes past the door, careful not to make a sound.

Once she gets up to her room, she takes a deep breath, stuffs some chips in her mouth. Then she turns her phone back on.

Neptune hasn’t sent anything else, though Venus knows her well enough to know that this won’t be the end. She doesn’t understand the difference between being told that you’re bad and actually being bad. She’ll keep trying to reach out to Venus until Venus can prove that it’s a bad idea, and if Venus keeps clinging to every scrap of affection Neptune gives her, that might not happen until it’s too late.

But what is there is enough to crumble any resolve Venus might be able to summon. It’s another text from an unknown number. “Hey, Venus,” it reads, “This is Jupiter. I don’t know if Neptune’s told you, but we’re worried about you, and we just wanted to make sure you’re okay. And also you’re one of the only people from camp I liked, and it would suck to lose contact with you. So like, let me know how you’re doing, I guess? Thanks.”

Venus’ grip on her phone tightens. They’re both so nice to her, they probably don’t even realize what they’re doing to her, and it’s not like it’s their fault that she’s like this. She can’t take this anymore. “I don’t need your pity,” she writes, as if she won’t lap it all up and beg for more.

It’s been hours since Jupiter sent her first message, but she still responds almost instantly. Venus wonders what her homecoming had been like. Had she been picked up by her not-Hemingway father or the mother who had decided to send her to the Scouts? What were they expecting to find when she returned?

They can’t have been expecting her to be the devil, at least. Jupiter’s always been too good for that. The fact that her parents can’t see it is a tragedy, almost as much as the fact that Jupiter herself can’t see it either.

And thinking about how good Jupiter is is so much easier than trying to deal with proof that she’s still thinking about Venus. She shakes her head and reads the latest message. “It’s nit pity. We’re friends, and I’m worried about tou,” she’s sent. Venus wonders if the typos are a testament to how quickly she was typing, or if the neatness of her initial message was the exception.

It doesn’t matter. Her finger seems to move on its own, with her only a spectator. “It’s okay,” it types. “I know you’d rather be talking to Neptune, and I understand. You shouldn’t feel guilty about me. I’ll be fine.”

“What? Venus, no,” Jupiter sends, but Venus doesn’t respond.

It’s better for both of them this way. Maybe she was able to delude herself before, but, well. Being the devil kind of put an end to that. Now all she can do is try to atone for her sins.

Sometimes things are easier when you can’t see or be seen.


End file.
